XC50 Aries Network Architecture

Last updated 31 July 2018 02:39

There are 4 dual socket nodes on blade, connected to a single Aries (switch) chip, and there are 16 Aries chips in a chassis connected to the backplane. On Māui, this implies each chassis contains 64 nodes, or 2,560 Skylake cores. There are 3 chassis in an XC50 cabinet, and two XC50 cabinets are an Electrical "group". Maui has 1.5 groups.

The performance characteristics are:

Intra-Chassis

Backplane

15 links in the backplane

Rank 1 (green) Network

14 Gbps

Intra-group

Copper cables

15 links in 5 connectors

Rank 2 (black) Network

14 Gbps

Inter-group links

Optical

10 links in 5 connectors

Rank 3 (blue) Network

12.5 Gbps

The centrepiece of the Aries network is dynamic routing through a large variety of different routes from Aries A to Aries B. Therewith the effective bandwidth is increased significantly. These dynamic routing on alternative paths is applied on all 3 levels of the network.